Off the map

Data projections:
Stuart Hamilton: "It's hard to predict the future, but I don't think we are going to return to an analog society. I think we are going to stay with digital and we'll have more data - and more spatial data, so we are going to need people who know how to manipulate that data."

GIS data-stitching opens new research horizons

by Joseph McClain
| May 10, 2010

GIS is making new types of research possible
at William & Mary. It's also allowing researchers to look at work in
progress in new, compelling ways.

GIS uses computers to connect the dots among the often-neglected spatial
components of data. The term itself is an acronym for "geographic information
system." Rather than a single system, GIS refers to a variety of techniques and
tools. Stuart Hamilton, director of the College's Center for Geospatial
Analysis (CGA), says Google Earth and other data-rich, interactive features on
the internet have made people familiar with the products of GIS, even if
they're unfamiliar with the technology itself. In the past few years, researchers
and scholars have discovered the world of GIS—and the world through GIS.

"Between 60 and 80 percent of all data collected has some spatial
component," Hamilton said. "A lot of people weren't even looking at the spatial
component of the data sets. Then GIS came along and people found that it's
applicable to not just geographers and geologists but also social scientists,
education researchers, public-policy people and more."

A new home for the CGA

The William & Mary Center for Geospatial Analysis is settling into
its new permanent location on the second floor of Swem Library. The birth of
the CGA was made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to
the College's Environmental Science & Policy program. In addition to the
Mellon grant, the center gets support from a number of other sources, including
the Charles Center, Swem Library, Provost Michael Halleran and Dean of Arts
& Sciences Carl Strikwerda. Gene Roche, from the College's Department of
Informational Technology, made certain
that the CGA had the technology it needed.

As the center gets support from a wide variety of sources, it provides
support to a wide range of disciplines. The CGA itself dates to 2008, but
Hamilton notes that individual programs and researchers at the College have
been using GIS for years.

"It was ad hoc, here and there, without any real organization," Hamilton
said of pre-CGA use of GIS. "You had some people in social sciences, like
Professor Saporito, dipping their toe into GIS. You had the Center for
Archaeological Research and the Center for Conservation Biology, using it on an
as-needed basis. Geology and environmental studies hired adjuncts over the
years to teach undergraduate courses."

Hamilton was referring to Salvatore Saporito, who worked with fellow sociologist
Deenesh Sohoni to build GIS-driven maps showing the impact of magnet schools and private schools on the
racial and economic integration of public schools. The W. M. Keck Environmental
Field Lab also brought Tim Russell on as GIS technician; he taught classes in
GIS software and contributed to a number of research projects.

SABINS moves in

The CGA has incorporated virtually all of the College's ongoing GIS work
into its own operations. Russell is now the coordinator of the center's
workshops. Saporito has literally moved into the CGA, after receiving a $1
million grant from the National Science Foundation to expand his GIS study of
school boundaries into a more ambitious project called SABINS—the School
Attendance Boundary Information System.

Saporito is now working on the two-year SABINS project from office space
in the CGA, with a staff that includes Ashwini Wakchaure, a GIS programmer;
Jeff Han, senior spatial database engineer; and a number of William & Mary
undergraduate researchers.

Both Hamilton and Saporito believe the establishment of the CGA at
William & Mary was instrumental in bringing the million-dollar NSF grant to
William & Mary. Hamilton says he expects the center to serve increasingly
as a research hub for the College.

"A lot of granting institutions look very favorably on GIS technology,"
he said. "They're looking for proposals that offer a way to incorporate it into
their curriculum and into their grants."

When Hamilton first arrived at William & Mary, he found that there
was substantial pent-up demand for GIS services here.

"There were an awful lot of people waiting for someone like me to come to
campus," he said. "There was a backlog of jobs waiting to be done, people who
know what they want to do, but who don't possess the GIS skills or the tools to
do it."

Some of Hamilton's first work, naturally enough, involved research done
by faculty in Environmental Science and Policy, which had secured the Mellon
grant that made the CGA possible. He introduced a GIS element into the studies
of some graduate students who were working under biologist John Swaddle to understand
the relationship between land use and the health of birds. He got involved
early—and remains involved—with Dan Cristol's s-GIG investigation of mercury in
songbirds of the Shenandoah Valley.

There are almost as many approaches to GIS tools and techniques as there
are potential applications. Hamilton is a faculty member himself, and therefore
often works as a collaborator, cited as a co-principal investigator on academic
papers. In other instances, he is a teacher-trainer, imparting GIS skills and knowledge
formally and informally. Researchers come to the CGA with all levels of
experience, from absolute novices to long-time GIS users, such as Saporito. No
matter the level of familiarity, all benefit.

"As far as faculty, Sal is the most skilled on campus. He's worked in
areas in which he made the discoveries himself," Hamilton said. "He may even
know more about the integration of census data with school data than almost
anyone."

Still, Hamilton was able to show Saporito a new and more efficient way to
solve problems, by using raster data rather than a vector data GIS approach.

More than one approach

"Sal didn't know much about raster data; he had to find a vector solution to his problems and it
all could become quite convoluted. He came to me and I said, ‘Well, that's a
raster problem. We can do that relatively simply'," Hamilton explained. "Sal
was limited to a set of solutions, often the correct solutions, but sometimes
they were very convoluted solutions. With knowledge of only one data model, he
had only a single path to go down. Now he's got a number of options."

Just as there is more than one way to approach a GIS problem, Hamilton
says when it comes to addressing the GIS needs of each of the individual
research projects at William & Mary, flexibility is the order of the day.
Quite often, he says, he trains student researchers to use the necessary GIS
techniques to apply to the research of their faculty mentors.

"There's no one way of working with people. It really depends on the
scope of the project, what their needs are and what their levels of familiarity
are," Hamilton said. "A lot of the faculty are just not going to have the time
to learn the GIS concepts and then apply them in the software. So it's good to
work through their students and have students that become skilled and can do
the GIS for them—or teach the faculty how to do it."

Outside the entrance to the CGA facility in Swem stands a display
dedicated to GIS-based research. There are academic papers on the effects of
Central American shrimp farms, real estate price change and a number of others.
Hamilton says even he is surprised by the breadth of applications for GIS
techniques.